Why I Left Christianity - Rhett McLaughlin

Rhett McLolin, welcome to the show! Thanks for having me, man. I can't believe you nearly made us change this tabletop to something cleaner. We do have something that's more professional. This is beautiful! I mean, you know, welcome to our space. Yeah, thanks for hosting me here. I usually open the show by saying something like, "Thanks for being here," or "Welcome to the show." I've done that on a few occasions in other people's sets and at other people's houses, and they kind of look at me a little bit blankly. So I'm sure you know what

I mean! But thanks for having me. You got a lot of character on this table. This is like a who's who of early decades ago. Yeah, you were pointing out like the Fine Bros here, and I saw like I just seen over there. It's like a real old-school thing. Why did it stop? What happened? We kind of ran out of people to talk to. It's honestly guest-based. We started our podcast as a guest-based show. We thought that we would be like the Mark Marin for internet personalities. Sure, there are two issues. Number one, there's only

so many—especially back in the day—only so many interesting internet personalities to talk to that were also willing to come into our studio out here. And then there's some dynamic that happens when two people are interviewing one person. And we were like, "This is not..." Yeah, I've seen that kind of thing before. A lot of other shows have multiple hosts, but there's like one main guy, maybe. But having two people, it's kind of tricky. There are podcasts that Right Link and I are always both trying to be the main guy. That's our problem. Yeah, we've made

a career of it. But on a podcast, it's the same thing interviewing two people. I've done that a few times as well. Like when I had Cliff and Stuart Connectly on, and they worked quite well as a pair, but it's quite difficult to know where to frame your question. And we're on the other side of that quite a bit, right? I mean, like I bet yeah, 99% of any interviews that I'm a part of, Link's right always right here. You know, we have to sit as Link. We're very precise about it. Do you feel a

bit naked sat on your own in a situation? No, I enjoy it. Yeah, well, I prefer it this way because I also prefer being naked, especially with you. There's something that gets lost if you really start getting into the weeds of a conversation with somebody and you start thinking, "Oh gosh, I better ask the other guy," that you can avoid or sort of not manage to really get into the weeds with a particular person. Now you have one of the biggest shows on YouTube with Good Mythical Morning. In my experience with any kind of YouTube

followership, you can't say anything without annoying somebody. We've already offended somebody in the comment section. You, with one of the biggest shows on YouTube, decided not too long ago, a few years back, to start talking about your spiritual deconstruction, as you call it, and your move away from Christianity. That must have been quite the move for you, and it's one of the reasons I'm interested in speaking to you. Hopefully, I know you've spoken a bit about it on various shows and things, but my audience is really interested in philosophy and theology. I'm sure they're fascinated

by some of the intricacies of your thoughts on this kind of stuff. But when you start thinking, "I want to say something about this," like why? You've got a good thing going, man. Why are you going to mess it up with all this stuff? Yeah, tell me about it. I started talking to Link about how I thought we needed to share our story, mostly because of how much we had disclosed about ourselves over the years. We, you know, our podcast even starting with this, when we were interviewing people, we would ask all these really personal

questions, ask them about their background. We would give a little bit of our background, but we would leave out this really foundational part of who we were. And then even in all the interviews that we would do about our career, we would basically—the story would go—"So we went to engineering school. We were engineers for a while, and then we became YouTubers." It was a very simple, easy-to-understand story, when the reality was, well, all throughout that time we were involved in Christian ministry. We were very involved with Campus Crusade for Christ. And in between being engineers

and being professional YouTubers, we were professional Christians. We worked full-time with Campus Crusade for Christ as, you know, campus missionaries for lack of a better word. Our ministry was essentially using our comedy to help Christian students figure out how to talk about their faith. Huh. So we would literally—we didn't put on big, you know, bait-and-switch evangelistic shows that you were supposed to invite non-Christians to. We were like, "Hey, let's do something where we kind of come into their typical weekly meeting, and we do something fun that's got music and video, and that's helping them kind

of see differently the way that they approach evangelism." The only reason that I'm doing what I do today is because of my background, because of all the experience that we had coming up in that setting. So it just felt disingenuous. To not talk about it. Yeah, yeah, it just be... it was like it began to kind of press on me like, "This is such a..." And also in the meantime, I had been through this complete deconstruction and essentially a deconversion, and so it's like I kind of have to tell the story of the background while

simultaneously telling the story of why I no longer believe it. Yeah. And so it did... it wasn't like a, "Oh, we got to go out there and like get on this." There was, by the way, not really a deconstruction train to get on at the time. It wasn't... I mean, there were some people who had talked about it, but I wasn't paying attention to that. I wasn't interested in that; I didn't know who had deconstructed publicly. I didn't know much about the word "deconstruction." So it wasn't a, "I want to be a part of a

movement," or "I see myself as part of a movement," or "a spokesperson for that." It was like, "We need to be honest with our audience." Yeah. Let's just tell the story. Campus Crusade for Christ. What is that about? Uh, well, let's see if I can remember exactly because I used to have to get up at the weekly meeting and say this: "Campus Crusade for Christ is an interdenominational Christian organization founded in 1951 by Bill and Vonette Bright." Wow. Our philosophy is threefold: to win, build, and send. Win students to Christ, build them up in their

faith, and send them out to continue the win-build-send process. How's that working out for you? Hey, it worked pretty well for a while, man. Yeah. Well, you were pretty knowledgeable, right? Like, you would be able to talk to people and convert people. I mean, presumably that doesn't go away. Like, you've still got the knowledge, right? Uh, yeah, you've still got it inside of you. The evangelical Christian part of my brain will never go away; it's always there—judging the deconstructed Los Angeles YouTuber. You know, I think so. I... Whenever I see somebody talk about me, I

try not to do that very often. Like, I know just being on your podcast and talking about it, like, we get... you know, you know this game very well. You give the material; you provide the material for all the Christian reaction channels. Oh, sure. This is what they feed off of, right? This is what they want. If we're talking about this, they want to talk about us talking about it. Yeah. Um, and so, a lot of times I'm listening to myself say things and I'm like, "Oh, well, that's what they're going to say about this."

Yeah. You know, and I try not to calculate that too much and think about it. You can drive yourself crazy trying to orchestrate all your words. Yeah, yeah. But it's something you're always aware of as a public figure. Was most of the stuff that you were doing biblical? Was it arguments for God's existence? What kind of approach were you taking? What's your expertise when it comes to evangelism? Um, so with Campus Crusade for Christ, we would share something called the "Four Spiritual Laws," and it was a little booklet essentially that Bill Bright, the founder of

Campus Crusade, had put together. It was essentially a gospel tract. You know, "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. All people have sinned..." and it's basically... it's the gospel, right? And "Four Spiritual Laws." It was very like 1950s Christianity, you know? Um, but it was very effective because it had you... you had the ability, and of course I wouldn't always break out the booklet; I would just, you know, maybe do it in the context of a conversation. But, you know, you might go out on... I mean, this... I mean, it sounds

crazy when you think about it, but like we would go down to spring break at like Panama City Beach, and you got all these kids just partying on the beach. And we were like, "Well, we're going to go out on the beach and we're going to start spiritual conversations with people, and we're going to plant seeds." In the least, and in the best case scenario, we're going to bring someone to a point of decision. That's what you want to do. You bring them to that point of decision, right? So a great question is, "You know,

if you were to die tonight, how certain are you that you would go to heaven?" Right? I mean, that's a great... it's heavy. And usually, if like you're in the middle of partying in Panama City Beach and you're like drunk, and you're... so many students are sort of, you know, day three, day four at spring break, and they've just been pumping themselves full of alcohol, and they're literally... some of them are... some of them are still having a blast, but some of them are like actively realizing that there's no fulfillment in the excesses, right? And

they're like... it's like the perfect time to approach. No, man, it's quite an existential moment, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I've seen a lot of interviews with like drunk people on the street, and it can go one of two ways. There are like the funny ones when people are vulnerable in the sense that they might say something a bit stupid or whatever, and it makes for a funny viral moment. But also... yeah, the... the... Christian outreach. I know people were doing that at my university too, where they used to sort of stand outside the nightclubs,

and they weren't actually preaching or evangelizing. They would just hand out, like, water and biscuits and things. I suppose it was like a, you know, it's a Christian route, but it is—I mean, all of the vices sort of come out in a nightclub. Yeah, in the party atmosphere, everything about your inhibitions—and I feel like that is probably the place where Christ enters many people. When people tell their stories about coming to Christianity, it's often that kind of situation, but writ large across their life. It's like, I was in the dumps; I had nowhere to turn.

At the end of the night at the club, you're sort of in a microcosm of a moment like that for the day. You know, you're tired, the lights have come on, and everything is suddenly really ugly. I was in Las Vegas; I remember I've been there once. I showed up at night and thought, "This is the most incredible thing I've ever seen." It was glamorous; it was glittering; it was beautiful. Then in the morning, I woke up relatively early, ’cause I was on UK time, and the whole thing was like baked in sunlight, and suddenly

it all looked really silly. It looked silly and plastic. My friend said it was a bit like at the end of a nightclub where the lights come on, and you realize everything's actually been ugly the whole time, and you just sort of see it. That's kind of what Jesus does; he just like turns the light on and shows you that everything was ugly all along. 'Cause, I mean, Vegas is one of the most demonic places I've ever been to in my life. Even had... Right. So, I was there with... There’s a show called The Ice

Coffee Hour, which I was on, and one of the hosts of that, he was sort of driving me down to LA, and we went past the... What's the pyramid one called? You know, the one that's like Egypt? I forget what the place is actually called. I don't know the name of it. This huge pyramid that shoots this massive beam of light up into the sky, right? And he said, "Oh, that's really interesting, actually, 'cause, you know, Las Vegas often gets these swarms of locusts." I was like, "Really? They get swarms of locusts?" He was like,

"Yeah." And you know, the crazy thing is, because this pyramid shoots up that massive beam of light, it’s amazing when it happens: they all swarm onto it and start going crazy. And I was like, "So you're telling me that swarms of locusts descend on Egypt in Sin City?" Yeah, it was all getting a little bit biblical. Yeah. And I kind of feel like that is the perfect place to walk up to somebody and be like, "Do you think there's something more?" Yeah, and it's so interesting because I think that one of the misconceptions about someone

like me, who was a person of Christian faith and is no longer a person of Christian faith, or, you know, I've got some faith in things, but not really religious faith, is that somehow the two alternatives are that life of excess and selfishness and pleasure or religious faith in Jesus. Mhm. And I think it can throw people off a lot of times when I'm like, "Oh, I recognize the..." you know, I don't see it as necessarily like, "Well, one is right and one is wrong," but it's just like, yeah, clearly, like, a human that is

simply focusing on pleasures like that, that ultimately end up just being—they become empty pretty quickly. Like, that's just a universal truth. That's not like you, as a Christian, don't have a universal hold on that truth. That's not just because it was mentioned in the Bible doesn't mean that that's the only place that truth shows up. Like, it's just a human experience, right? So now, as someone who doesn't really know what I think about God, I still recognize the emptiness of a place like Las Vegas, but I'm also like, "You know what? Maybe every once in

a while, I want to go experience some excess pleasures." Yeah, oh, it was fun! You know what I mean? Yeah. And not judge myself or judge others for it at the same time, yeah, knowing that if I take the perspective into that, that, "Oh, I recognize the emptiness of this," you know, eating at a buffet—I mean, how many times can you eat at a buffet right before you're like, "Okay, get me out of the buffets?" But I feel like, again, this is kind of the perspective that I had. I think about the way that I

thought about those students when I was there with the truth in my hand. You know, I was like, "There are two paths here: there's a path that you're on, which is just self-sabotage, or there's Jesus," never considering that, "Well, maybe there's another..." Maybe there's a few more ways to think about these things. Do you think there's pride in there? I mean, one of the worst sins a Christian can commit is the sin of pride. And I think they're constantly sort of battling against it, especially when you're in... A position, I mean, let alone some of

the people I talk to, have public platforms constantly putting themselves in front of a microphone and answering people's questions and being constantly praised. Must be really difficult to not get prideful when it starts working. But even in an outreach situation like this, is there an element where it's sort of like, not even not, not like I'm better than these people, but like, look at me doing this good thing, walking into the depths of hell and paralleling it and getting everyone, you know, back to Christ? Yes, I mean, I think that there is an element of

sort of taking pride in the work that you're doing for God. Even though you can easily give God the credit and be like, "The Spirit was working through me." Because if you know the code, you know the code of humility, and you know how to talk about these things, but secretly you're thinking about how you're doing in relation to other Christians, and you're thinking about how they're doing in relation to you. Yeah, you can't—it's human nature. You're going to do that, but I think there's another type of pride that I think back on those times.

You know, I remember a specific instance, and this is actually after I was no longer on staff with Campus Crusade, but I was still very active in the church. I was leading a Bible study, and we had become friends with this couple that were Catholic. In my estimation, Catholics weren't Christians; I mean, I was that type of evangelical. Really, I was like, "Well, maybe there are some that actually have a relationship with Jesus." Yeah, but they believe, you know, they believe that it's works and faith. It's not just faith alone. And so they don't have

the grace thing figured out. At the very least, I need to introduce them to the real truth, right? And so I knew they were going to be there. And so I was like, "Well, I'm going to do a Bible study. I'm going to go from Galatians," right? Because Galatians talks about how it's about faith and not about works. And it was one of those things that in retrospect, I was thinking about them and everyone else in the Bible study. The other regulars knew that I was kind of preaching to them from this perspective. And I

think back on that, and I'm like, I brought a lot of spiritual pride to that situation because I thought I had the correct perspective and just assumed they didn't agree with me about this. So, and they're definitely wrong. I'm bringing them in to give them the truth. When you think that you've got the truth and it's a truth that impacts everyone, it applies to everyone, it's really difficult to not take pride in that and to begin to see yourself as better. I mean, I'm not saying that all Christians think that they're better than other people.

I'm just saying from my experience, knowing—I remember lying there when I was in college and thinking how grateful I was that I basically believed the right thing about everything. Yeah, well, I often parody Christian denominations with that exact thought. But it's like how—what are the odds? How lucky you are! And with no irony at all, I, of course, was, you know, a 20-year-old kid, but I was lying there in bed, and I was like, man, not only am I a Christian, but I am the right kind of Christian! Like, I believe the right stuff! I'm

in the right denomination! I'm in the right ministry! Like, even amongst the ministries here on campus, I'm in the one that is the most serious about this. Yeah, and I was like, this is—I'm so—God, I'm so thankful that I'm right about everything. Essentially, is what I was saying. Yeah, those are my nightly affirmations too. I'm just so grateful for being right about everything. It's fascinating. There is an interesting paradox there, the so-called preface paradox, where people can think that they're right about everything whilst also thinking they're wrong about at least one thing. It's called the

preface paradox because at the beginning of a book, authors will often say, "If there are any mistakes in here, like, you know, I'm sorry," but they've gone through meticulously and checked every single one. So if I went through every single one of your beliefs individually and said, "Do you think this is true?" Yes. "Do you think this is true?" Yes. Because I'm going through your beliefs. So definitionally, every one of them would say yes. But if at the end I then say, "But do you think at least one of those beliefs is actually false?" if

you're a bit humble in any respect, you go, "Yeah, of course one of them is false." Yeah, so you've got this paradox of thinking they're all true but at least one of them is false. It's got to do with like probabilistic certainty, probably, but yeah, there's that feeling that you've got on your side as well, and you sort of go to sleep slightly prideful, slightly content, slightly happy. Where does that certainty come from? Was it the result of Bible study and consideration of different groups and denominations? Was it more sociological, just sort of the way

you were brought up? Were you cognizant of the factors which led you to be in the correct denomination and the correct student group? Yeah, so not at the time. I think that what I would have said is that, um, I had been taught the right stuff from my parents, and I had been in the right environment growing up. Um, I think that ultimately there are a couple of factors that contribute to it. I think number one, certainty is a really important aspect of religious faith, especially Christianity, and especially evangelical Christianity, because I think that agreeing

with a set of propositional statements is actually what—if you ask somebody to describe it, they might say, “Well, it's about a relationship with Jesus.” But if you're like, “Well, yeah, but what does that mean?” these propositional statements come up. It's, “Well, I believe this about Jesus.” If any church worth its salt has a "we believe" place on their website, right? Mhm. That's what I thought, right? And so I think that being certain and being right about these things comes at a premium. It is really, really important. So I thought that being certain was very important.

And then I just think I had the type of personality and came from the type of family where we kind of thought we had it figured out, right? Like, this is a big problem for me now—not to settle on what I think I figured out, to be really doubtful of my particular perception of the world, to say, “Well, again, I know that I'm wrong about some stuff, and there's a lot of stuff that I'm not sure about.” Um, but I can struggle with wanting to latch on to certain ideas and be like, “Well, I've got

this figured out. I've got this figured out.” And you start trying to build this worldview. So I think it's a combination of the environment where certainty was really important and my personality—the way that I gravitated towards that. We'll get back to Rhett in just a moment, but first, do you trust the news? I don't. And a lot of that has got to do with the bias that inevitably seeps into media reporting. We can never get rid of media bias, but wouldn't it be great if there were a way for us as consumers of news to

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you in a particular denomination? Were there particular beliefs that you held that most Protestants would sort of disagree with you about? What I would say is we called ourselves non-denominational, but from a theological perspective, we would have most aligned with just the Baptist church. Sure. So we were— you know, we were probably a little bit more reformed Baptist, right? So there was a strong—not as strong as you would have in like a PCA church, a Presbyterian Church in America—about predestination. Mhm. But, you know, we were kind of soft Calvinists, like four-point Calvinists, you know. Um,

and so we definitely believed that God had predetermined essentially who was His child, which was interesting to do in the context of evangelism. It made you ask, like, how does that affect you when you go onto the beach in spring break and you're talking to people? Do you just have this thought like, “Well, I hope I happen to bump into the people that God's already preordained to come to faith?” Yeah, I think yes. I think the analogy that I would have used is that I'm planting a bunch of seeds. Yeah. And some of them are

sort of predetermined to grow and to flourish. Yeah. You know, and I'm just the one that's planting the seeds. But then, if it's not up to you, is it like, if you don't plant those seeds, then they wouldn't get saved? They wouldn't get saved. I mean, it kind of seems to... this whole predestination idea seems to undermine the motivation for going. Oh, I—this was probably my key theological conundrum in college because we really—I was close with guys who were reformed in this way, you know, and were Calvinists. They would be like, “Listen, it's just very

clear in the scriptures that he who he predestines, he predestines.” It's like, you know? And so I remember sitting on the porch one time with my friends as we were talking about that. I said, “Okay, well, all right, if I want to believe the Bible,” and again, I, of course, I bought into univocality. And I was able to reinterpret the passages that would question... This perspective, in light of the ones that I had gravitated towards, is how you build, you know, a systematic theology to begin with. But I remember sitting with them and saying, "Okay,

I can, I can, I can agree that God preordained a certain number of people to be His children." Which definitely means that a certain number of people are not predestined to be His children. In fact, statistically speaking, the majority of people who have ever lived and live right now are going to be in hell. So I believe that because the Bible says it, but—and I paused because I was a little bit nervous—I was like, "But doesn't that kind of make God an asshole?" And they were like, "No, no, no! He's just like you; you can't

understand. First of all, we all deserve to be in hell. The fact that He would save, He's justified in not saving anyone." Yeah, that's the line, isn't it? And so then I was like, "Yeah, but He decided to create a world in which these beings would exist." Like, He still made that choice. Doesn't that still kind of make Him an [ __ ]? So I was having thoughts like that at like 20 years old, but was able to continue to carry like a cognitive dissonance that allowed me to still be a very strong Christian and

just be like, "Okay, there are things that I don't understand; God's got that figured out." That'll be the first question I ask Him when I get to heaven. Yeah. And of course, there's no Christian who doesn't have thoughts like that swimming around in their minds, too. For some people, those are questions that they just retain and, like you say, think, "I'll ask God when I see Him." For others, it's like the first domino falling apart. I'm interested in what your view of hell was at the time when you said that most people are probably going

to hell. What did you think hell was at the time when you were around 20? I had talked myself into, mostly as a result of that struggle I was having, that it was probably some sort of—I basically became, without really reading too much about it, an annihilationist. Yeah. And so just the idea that people who don't know God, who are not His children, will probably go through some sort of torment, but it won't be forever and then they will cease to exist. Yeah, yeah. And that hell is—I mean, annihilationism is the view that people will

be annihilated if they don't go to heaven. They sort of cease to exist maybe after a period of suffering of some sort. I've always been quite attracted to that idea because of the classical, uh, Thomistic arguments for the existence of God, which have God as like the ground of being. Mhm. If God is the foundation of being itself and everything that is participates in Him, then if hell is something like separation from God, and if God is the ground of all being, then what does it mean to not be with God? It means to not

be. It means to not exist. So I've always thought philosophically there's good grounding for considering separation from God to be the same thing as not existing because, to exist is to participate in God's existence, as some of the classical philosophers would put it. But that's not as motivational as the fire and brimstone. Yeah, imagery. And presumably in your outreach, you wouldn't push too heavy on the hell stuff, especially considering that you thought most people were going there anyway, and there's nothing about—Right. And I think that it's interesting to see—I'm still a fan of Christian apologetics.

It's fascinating to me to see the way that—and especially now, there wasn't nearly as much apologetics media as there is now when I was deconstructing, because this mostly happened to me in the late, as you know, 2010, 2011, and nobody was making—there were people writing books, but nobody was making internet content about this stuff. But I kind of dip in and dip out, and to see the way the conversation around hell is evolving is fascinating because it is a really—you know, it's like if you've got a product, it's the one thing where we get all

the bad reviews about this. It's like, ah [ __ ], people keep talking about this one thing and it's the hell thing. So how do we rebrand hell? And the way that hell is being rebranded is smart. You know, a lot of people are moving into this, you know, annihilationism, but also there are people who just frame it as separation from God. It's just simply like you chose; you rejected God's love. Like that's not hateful for Him to say, "Well, you now are just going to be on your own," and whatever that is, to deal

with your own stuff. And it sounds kind of—it sounds a lot nicer. It just sounds like you're just rejecting something. And I think that's become a pretty big talking point. Yeah. What, um—I mean maybe this was one of them, but when do the dominoes start to fall over for you? How old are you and what starts to happen? Because right now you're speaking past tense. So at some point you go from not just Christian, but really involved, professional Christian, as you put it, to now where you are. Where does this start? So I, in my

early 20s, uh, you know, the first couple of years out of school, I'm an engineer, civil engineer. Um, I'm still very— Involved in Campus Crusade at the time, I'm not having that many, you know, existential questions about it. If anything, I'm thinking about how I'm gonna, I'm moving towards being a professional Christian because my wife was still in college at the time. And so Link and I had kind of, you know, we've been best friends since first grade, 1984, so we kind of knew what we were working towards. The idea that we were going to

develop this ministry where we got to be funny and make our comedy videos, and we were really trying to find a way to do the thing that we loved for the cause that we loved. So it sort of started with God in the periphery, here, of like, with all the video stuff, and it’s all sort of directed towards, at least subtly to some degree, evangelism. Yeah, definitely. I think it was a way to have my cake and eat it too because I really wanted—like, we are entertainers at heart. We wanted to be filmmakers. We wanted

to make things that, you know, had significance culturally. We wanted to do that from the very beginning. So we always had our minds on this idea that maybe we could use this ministry, or we could have a ministry where we’re doing these things that we love, and then maybe something that we make will be impactful enough so that we could one day—maybe we’ll move to Hollywood, and maybe we’ll have a ministry there just through the things that we create. That was sort of the thought in the early days. So, shortly after the engineering stint, I

go on staff with Campus Crusade. At that point, you know, you’re going to the staff training, and you’re taking the seminary classes, and your initial—and I was always a student, you know, I was not like a super deep student of theology, but I would say moderately deep. There were certain ideas that I would gravitate towards and things that I liked to think about and talk about. At that same time, I was given a book, and I never really thought about the intersection of science and faith. I think the way that I would have described it

is: yeah, I think that most scientists are not Christians. Most scientists are atheists, and they’ve come up with some pretty wacky ideas to try to explain the world and why people are the way that they are, why the world is the way that it is. They’re mostly just desperate attempts to explain the world without God’s involvement. So that whole thing about evolution and how long the world has been here—that's probably all BS. But I didn’t think about it any more deeply than that. Mhm. I wasn’t like a staunch young earth creationist; I didn’t think about

that issue in particular. But I picked up a book from an astronomer, Hugh Ross, and I’m sure you know—I've mentioned this before, and you know, he has a Christian ministry that is very anti-evolution but very pro-old universe, huh, from the standpoint of astronomy, which, you know, obviously when you look at all the astronomical evidence and the speed of light and the size of the universe and all this stuff—yeah, okay. The universe has been around for probably as long as the scientists are saying. But then he went on to essentially say that, you know, all God's

truth, all truth is God's truth, and this is totally compatible with the Bible. But just so you know, evolution didn’t happen. And he was a proponent of something called progressive creationism, which essentially was: yes, the world has been around for as long as the scientists say, and these fossils we find are legitimate fossils that are approximately the date that they’re saying they are. But God was creating new batches of creatures, special creations, at different stages throughout the history of the world. Whoa. And then ultimately resulting in the creation of people. So, why? Great question. Great

question. So, I remember thinking as I’m reading this, I’m like, it’s the first time I ever thought about there being some reconciliation between what we observe in science and my belief about the world. And I just remember thinking, this doesn’t feel like a good explanation. I’ve never heard of somebody—I mean, I’m sure I’ve met someone who probably believes that the earth is old and the universe is old but maybe is suspicious of evolution. But specifically, like: well, I’m a scientist, and I’m an astronomer, and there’s just no way I can look at the redshifting of

the galaxies and deny that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. But that evolution stuff, from that other field of biology that I’ve probably never really seriously studied, yeah, know that’s all BS. And instead, I mean, God is just creating animals willy-nilly. And there are animals that are getting more and more like a person before the people. Yeah, it’s like God is just sort of doing little trial runs or something, right? I mean, what does that say about God? Is what I was thinking. Yeah, it gets there eventually. That is a little bit strange. I

suppose it’s kind of biblical in the sense of like stretching out the story of Genesis over however long you needed, and animals sort of popping in on different days and stuff like this. But yeah, I mean, the biggest problem for me that evolution poses to the Christian—and a lot of Christians today just accept evolution. They’re like, “Yeah, sure.” You know, humans all have a common ancestor with other animals. The biggest problem that I think it poses is the seeming arbitrariness with which you have to say that, presuming that our apish ancestors don't get to inherit

eternal life. At some point, a mother gives birth to a child, and the child is morally condemnable to hell but also potentially has the ability to inherit eternal life, but his mother doesn't. What the difference is there, and maybe it's just a brute fact. Maybe God just breathed life into that particular organism. But it just seems a bit arbitrary and unfair that that person's suffering will now be redeemed and it now means something, but their mother, who is the same organism, same suffering, same lifestyle, same everything, dies like an animal. It just doesn't seem right

to me. Unless you want to say that personhood is something which develops as well, but that gets you into a whole lot of trouble. And so that's where I ended up going, right? Because when I was... I didn't really buy into the progressive creationism thing, but I was so sure that evolution didn't happen. I was like, when you're raised in the Christian faith and the only exposure to the idea of evolution you've ever had has come through the filter of a Christian scientist telling you why it's not legitimate, you know, somebody comes into your church,

and they're like the evolution expert, and they make it seem so impossible that you walk out of that with a full affirmation of the idea that evolution definitely didn't happen and it's a horrible explanation. It will be debunked by the scientists themselves within our lifetime. Like, that's the kind of stuff that we told ourselves, right? And we firmly believed it. But because of this proposal of this progressive creationist idea, because of the age of the universe and the age of the Earth from a geological—I've always been interested in geology—but from a geological standpoint, I was

like, "Oh well, this is inescapable. This isn't like the way that Answers in Genesis has framed this issue." I mean, I'm not going to say it's definitely disingenuous; I think they really just believe that it has to be consistent with the Bible, and so they're just willing to completely reshape everything that they're seeing in light of that. But I essentially was like, "Well, this doesn't make any sense." So then the idea of considering evolution, which just felt... I was like, "Am I actually about to do this?" And I was like, "Well, I think C.S. Lewis

believed in evolution." You know, you start saying these things like, "Yeah, but there are a lot of Christians who are like theistic evolutionists, and okay, so maybe there's something to this." So I read Francis Collins' book, *The Language of God*. And the thing that I took away from that book was that, well, evolution happened as well. And you know, he touches on it a little bit. He talks about, in that book, I think he talks about the second chromosome, the fusing of the second chromosome. Mhm, I think he talks a little bit about retroviruses, and

essentially, you know, we've got the marks of the same retroviruses on our DNA that chimpanzees do, right? There are just these, again, there's no other way to see it. Just inexplicable data, right? It's like, if we're not related to every other animal on Earth, well God certainly tried to make it seem like we are. Yeah, and so then that was a huge moment for me. I remember coming home, still living in North Carolina. Again, a lot of people think that the story that is often told is that Link and I were Christians, we came to

Los Angeles, we were corrupted by this sinful city, and we threw away our faith. And the reality—and I've told it many times, but you know, it doesn't... it's passed over—is all this happened when I was in North Carolina, right? This happened when I was completely buckled into the Bible Belt as tightly as you can be, surrounded by people who agreed with me about all these things, with no social pressure to deviate from that at all. In fact, a lot of social pressure to stay. So I was struggling a lot because I didn't have anybody to

talk to about this. Yeah, I remember talking to Link. I mean, I talked to Link about it a little bit, and he would just kind of be like, "Oh, shit." Like, it felt like you were learning a lot of things that seemed problematic, but I'm not going to think... I don't want to think about this. Yeah, yeah. Jesse, my wife, who did come from a young Earth creationist background, like, that's what she was taught growing up. When I came home and I was like, "We need to talk about something," and I said, "I am thoroughly

convinced that evolution is true and that we are related to every other animal. I believe in common ancestry, and I just think that it is not just... I sort of think it's true. It's just like my reading has led me to think that if this isn't true, then I actually can't determine what anything that's true is." It's so overwhelming because I'd read in... Additionally to that, she just starts crying because this represented—she knew what this represented, right? This was this seismic shift. And I think a lot of people that I tell this story to are

like, "What do... "You mean, what? There are all these Christians that believe in evolution? Like, I can't believe that this was so significant for you." But I think the reason it was is because, at that point, I realized how wrong I could be about something so fundamental. Yeah. And I never, ever considered that I might be wrong about something so fundamental. And then, not only was I wrong, but all of these Christian apologists, who were so sure about their critiques of evolution, had missed the boat so significantly on this that suddenly I was like, can

I trust anything else they've got to say about this? So that was the first big domino. Yeah, it's significant, like you say. I mean, you might think, well, there are Christians who believe in evolution, but it depends which way you come at it. I mean, if you're somebody who's like a scientifically minded person who comes to faith in Jesus, you're not going to abandon evolution, but you might think, "Okay, I can make this all work." But if you've come from the background you've come from, it's like, yeah, it's like going up to your wife and

saying, you know, I just think maybe we should—uh, I just think maybe we should live in separate houses or something. And your wife starts bawling, and someone says, "I don't really know; some people do that. Some married couples, they sort of live apart and stuff." Like, yeah, but what it represents to move from where we are now and the way we were living to having this kind of question or this kind of desire indicates a direction of thought, yeah, which you don't really want to entertain. Your wife, if I'm not mistaken, was a student of

Bart Ehrman at Chapel Hill. She was, right? And was this around this kind of time? Was she already being fed the atheist lies through her professor? When she—this was undergrad, you know, at UNCC. And, um, she at that point—this was before we even went on staff with Campus Crusade. I mean, there was no questioning of anything. Like, we both saw Bart as the enemy, right? This guy is coming, and he's just decimating the faith of Christian students, and with a laugh, you know, he comes in with that chuckle that is so disarming. And it's funny;

I haven't met Bart. I want to, uh, because I want to be able to tell him this story. Well, the first thing that would happen is, Jesse, you know, my wife is—she's very passionate; she's very smart. And so she was a great defender of the faith when she was in it. And she would challenge him, right? And she would go up to him after class and be like, "What about this?" or "What about that?" And then she would come and report back, like, "This is what he said." And, you know, I'm sure that there are

many students who have continued to attempt this strategy with him over the years. At the same time, there was somebody who was working with Campus Crusade at UNC who approached a couple years later when Link and I were already beginning to do our ministry work, who approached me and Link and said, "We actually want to create some resources to counter what Bart is doing on campus because we feel like we need to equip students better because they're going into these classes of his and having these—being confronted with these questions. What can we do, like, in

terms of a multimedia project to address that?" So we were actually beginning to have those conversations. It never became anything. I mean, how ironic would it be if I could dig up a video of me criticizing Bart from 20 years ago? I kind of wish we had done it, just so I'd have it now. That would be awesome. Um, but yeah, so there was never, um, I think that there was, especially in those days—in the college days—there was zero curiosity, right, about whether or not I might be wrong. Yeah. You know, that wasn't even up

for debate. There was full confidence and no curiosity. Um, and I am in a very, very different place. I think those two things have reversed at this point in my life. Right, right. Very low confidence in my perspective and high curiosity for all of this stuff. Yeah, I feel like that's been happening to me over the past few years as well. And I think it's for the better. It's less entertaining, and it's less fulfilling on a superficial level because it's nice to be able to— even when you're just talking to somebody, it's nice to be

able to, at dinner, when somebody asks you what—and you think, "Right here it is! I'll lay it out. Here's my beliefs, and here's why I think this, and let's have a discussion about it." It's less fulfilling to sort of go, you know what, man, I've kind of no idea, but here are some thoughts. But I think it protects yourself against the kind of spiritual crisis which you inevitably run up against when that first domino starts to fall. And for you, it was evolution. You have—you've said before that you used to kind of evangelize against evolution

without having known very much about evolution. I mean, it sounds like the moment you started reading into evolution of its own accord, you became convinced by it. How do you navigate arguing against evolution if you haven't already engaged with that primary literature? Like, I'm really intrigued when I heard you say that. Some other show or something. It's like, well, you know, I hadn't really learned about evolution, but I used to go out and argue against it. What arguments are you using? Like, how do you do that? Great question! First of all, it was a different

time. Yeah, anyone who's interested in these issues now can get—uh, I mean, you can just ask ChatGPT to give you a primer on evolution, but all I had was— I mean, there were a few books, but one I remember had this—I can’t remember the author's name, but the title was *Icons of Evolution*, and it kind of talks about the quote-unquote best arguments for evolution, and he talks about why they're all corrupt. And so what I found is that, first, first of all, 99% of the people that I engaged with about this, where I was from

and at the time, knew nothing about evolution. Even if they were like, "Yeah, I—I agree with that because that's what the scientists say." Yeah. But then you're like, "Describe the mechanism of evolution." It's like, "We come from monkeys," right? Well, I—I had, you know, I had read enough to say things like, "Okay, so you're saying that the primary raw material of evolution through natural selection are genetic mutations. So give me an example of a beneficial mutation." And at best, your beneficial mutation just causes a change in color. But give me an example of a new

species. Yeah, that doesn't happen. That stare is quite, quite intimidating. Suddenly I'm like, I'm thinking, "Is evolution true? I don’t know." Right, man, I don’t know, man. And so I just had those back pocket arguments, and then I would say things like, "Take, for instance, if we took all the dogs in the world and put them out into the wild, what would happen? We would have a convergence to a type of canine that could survive in the wild. And it wouldn't be my little poodle, and it wouldn't be the Great Dane. It wouldn't be these

extravagant dogs that we have created through artificial selection. It would be the one that adapts to the environment. And that would probably look like a wolf." Mhm. End of story. Evolution doesn't happen. You know, and most people who don't know anything about it are like, "Oh, okay, I guess it doesn't happen." Yeah, it's easy enough to do when somebody really, really just doesn’t know. Uh, because I think most people are at that position where they kind of know that evolution is this thing, and it's got something to do with genetics and environment selection, but all

you need is like one good counter-example or question that can't be answered along with that confidence. Yeah. And those eyebrows. Yeah, the eyebrows are key—the eyebrows and the confidence, and there's something about the fact that you're doing this kind of professionally as well. Like if they know, "Oh, this is a guy who's part of this organization and whatnot," they're probably thinking, even if I had an answer, he'll have heard it because he does this every day. And so, like, there's just something about that confidence which is going to be quite off-putting for people. But presumably

those questions start to get answered for you by the reading that you're doing. And was it—I mean, you said it was Francis Collins's book. Is there a moment where you're reading it, and like your mind goes to those apologetical arguments that you make, and you're like, "Oh, that doesn’t work"? Yeah, I'm like, "This, you know, there’s not an explanation for this." And of course, you can do that. You can—every single one of these things, there's a page on the Answers in Genesis website for everything that we could talk about related to evolution. So they've got

their perspective on the second chromosome and the fusing of that chromosome. They've got their perspective on these retroviruses. And I think I was getting to a place where I no longer—I would essentially, I just—I read their responses and I was just like, "This is not, this can't be right. Like, they have to be wrong about this. Like, this is not a good faith argument. This is not a good faith answer," you know? And that's when it started dawning on me that, okay, I began to notice a pattern. And I think maybe I didn't even realize

I was noticing a pattern yet, but this is the pattern that started then and then propagated itself throughout my entire deconstruction. And that is, there's a type of answer that someone gives when their allegiance is to the truth that they need to be true. And there's a type of answer that people who are actually interested in the truth give. And what I kept finding is that Christian apologetics, you know, really consists of people who are like, "Well, the truth cannot be questioned; the truth—we've predetermined that this is true, and now we've got to find a

way to buttress that truth." And there’s a tenor to those arguments that they don’t hold up very well under scrutiny. When you get the answer to the answer to the answer to the answer, you just keep finding—like, it just seems like these people seem to be interested in what actually happened, and these people seem to be interested in the truth that they hope that happened. Mhm. And that was a huge flip for me because, what, again... As a Christian, what I thought is, we have the truth; they have the desperate attempt to be anti-good, right?

You know, we were taught that these evolutionists, these professors who are teaching this kind of stuff, like, they're sinful; they're deceived. They don't want, they desperately don't want God to exist, so therefore they have to come up with these ideas in order to explain things. Right? But when you're like, actually, first of all, most of these ideas came from Christians. You know, the age of the earth—these geologists back in the day, most people were Christians; it’s just the fact of the matter—and they were like, "Oh, this is how God must have done it." Yeah. And

then, when they find evolution, they think, "God must have done it in this way." Um, and so the scientific stuff—there were plenty of people who taught me, like, it's okay. You can believe that; you can be a theistic evolutionist. You probably still need to believe in a literal Adam and Eve because the atonement still needs to make sense; you know, original sin's got to make sense. And I was like, okay, yeah, those arguments seem like we're just trying to marry two disparate ideas. Yeah, but I was like, okay, I just think that mentality of finding

that the people, because it got into biblical scholarship after that, it got into, "Okay, well, the primeval history—okay, so this is, I guess, this is allegory, like this didn't happen—these are religious myths that were adapted from other myths that were around at the same time." Mhm. The flood didn't happen. Yeah, the Tower of Babel is a weird explanation for language, and I started seeing all that. And so, I was like, okay, now my entire view of the beginning of the Bible is different. And again, I would go to the apologetics answer, and I would be

like, one person seems to be like, the critical scholars actually seem to be interested in what happened—like, why did these people write this? Why is it like this? Where did this idea come from? And then, the Christian apologists seem to be like, "Well, we know it's God's word, so how do we prove it?" Mhm. And it just kept creeping closer and closer to Jesus. And I had this—like, this happened, this was years, right? 'Cause I was like, "Well, I'm never—I'm not going to stop believing in Jesus." You know, you can have these weird ideas about

the Old Testament, but like, Jesus is different. I mean, I have a personal relationship with him, and, um, you know, and that stuff's true, right? You know the stuff about the resurrection—my arguments for why the resurrection had happened and it being the best explanation for the beginning of the church and all this—I had those arguments in my back pocket. But, long story short, eventually those arguments fell victim to the same type of critique. They're a little bit different because I do think that there is a more interesting conversation around the resurrection because you can kind

of know a little bit less about what happened, and you can be somebody who believes all this stuff about that I might agree with related to evolution, but then be like, I have a faith position that Jesus actually rose from the dead. I recognize that I can't—it's not a scientific thing; I can't prove it. It is a little bit of a different category, but it opened me up to questioning these sacred ideas. And it's just the most sacred idea of all—that Jesus was the Son of God who rose from the dead—eventually was the last domino

to fall. Wow. And how does that finally fall? I mean, because the evolution thing confronts—and I think the reason why it was so scandalous in the 19th century is kind of just a vibe shift, right? Because when you speak to philosophically minded Christians, they will quite correctly say there is no argumentative syllogism you can construct which shows that because animals have a common ancestor, therefore God doesn't exist. That just— that doesn't follow; there's no argument you can make from that. But it's hard to put into words, just like the feeling. Again, it's like we were

saying before about indicating a direction of thought: when a society is based upon the idea that human beings are special and unique, this idea—if you're smart—it doesn't need to undermine the idea that God exists, but it shows this direction of thought, like, "Oh gosh, we’re not as special as we thought we were." Where's that going to lead? I'm pretty sure that in the first edition of "The Origin of Species," in 1859—that beautiful ending, um, you know, "There is grandeur in this view of life, from many different species," whatever it is, "having been breathed into many

lives or into one, having been and are being evolved." And there's that phrase: like, "having been breathed into one or too many," you know, primordial forms of life. And presumably because of the backlash that this idea receives in the second edition of "The Origin of Species," "having been breathed by the Creator into one life or too many," Darwin defaced the ending—his moving ending to "The Origin of Species." And I think by edition three it was back out again. So you can, if you—I’ve seen one in person, an actual second edition of like a rare bookshop.

If you happen to be in like a fancy rare bookshop and see if they've got a second edition, it will... "Say by the creator, because there's just something so confronting about it that you need to respond to. But okay, there's that, and then there's the resurrection. That's not just like a vibe shift. This is the historical claim upon which Christianity is based. And like you say, it's less accessible to the scientific method because it's a singular event. Yeah, it's not like a process that's still going on today that we can biologically observe. And you can't

scientifically or historically prove the resurrection, but you can prove surrounding facts. You can say that Jesus was crucified, that his disciples claimed to see him, all of this kind of stuff. All of those arguments are still there and still sat in your mind. Presumably, you're pretty familiar with them as someone who specializes in outreach. Why would that change? Like, what shifts the dial on those kinds of arguments for you? And this is where I, you know, I don't remember specifically like, okay, well, it was this book; it was that. But you know, it could be

something as simple as one aspect of that argument, of that case. You know, probably the most famous one is, "Well, why would the disciples die for a lie?" Mhmm. And then when I really looked into that, I found that, well, I don't think I can actually historically defend that anyone died for something that they knew to be a lie. Like, I think that this can be explained by them being deceived, right? They could just be wrong about what they saw or their perspective. But I think the bigger picture was, as I started looking at different

perspectives on the historical Jesus, I remember there was one book that was called "The Historical Jesus: Five Views." And I read that book, and I think every one of them was some kind of Christian — just different gradations of liberal or progressive Christian. And everyone laid out their case with a lot of confidence and a lot more scholarship and knowledge than I have about the subject. But it was so gray, and I just started... this feeling began to creep in, which was like, okay, well, maybe he did rise from the dead. But what I've learned

about the process of historical investigation, and also just the nature of human psychology, and the nature of religious movements, and the nature of people's willingness to believe things, like it began to dawn on me that I don't know exactly what happened with Jesus. I don't know the nature of his — specifically the nature of his death. Like, was he left on the cross? Was he thrown into a large, you know, mass grave? Was he put into a rich man's grave by Joseph of Arimathea? Was that invented? I don't know. But what seems to be pretty

clear to me is that it's almost certain that there's some explanation for how it all started that isn't that he actually raised from the dead. And my compulsion to believe that he raised from the dead is a religious position. It is a faith position. It's not a historically defensible position to the degree that these Christian apologists make it out to be. We were talking last night about Dale Allison, how I just think I love his book. And this was all like, you know, I read that like two years ago, so this is all way after

my deconstruction, but I'm still interested in the subject. But you know, he's a Christian; he believes that it happened. But I think he's got one of the best books on the resurrection. The thing that's so refreshing about it is he's not coming at this from a Gary Habermas standpoint where he's like, this is the most reasonable thing, and if you don't agree with that, you're being unreasonable. It's like, well, no, it's — I mean, we're talking about the pinnacle of an unreasonable idea, an unreasonable event. This is not — if this happened, this is something

I have to accept on faith, and I am completely fine with people who do that. But my intuition is that it didn't happen. And I have sort of lost my ability to have faith in things that are just conjecture, and in things that I... something that foundational. I mean, I still have what I would call some level of religious faith; we can talk about what that might look like. But I think that my ability to have faith in the idea of the resurrection just was like, "Why would you choose for that to be the thing

that you believed in when all these other things have sort of fallen apart?" To this process came across an interesting idea. A friend told me — I wish I could remember exactly how this goes — but I'm pretty sure that there is a development as the gospels go on about the description of the tomb. So, like in Mark's gospel, presumably, I think it just says that Jesus is put in a tomb. And in Matthew's gospel, it becomes a new tomb. And then I think by Luke, it's a new tomb in which no one had been

laid. Or maybe that's John; I can't remember the details. But there are things that you wouldn't notice that — I'd never come across this idea before. If the empty tomb is an important apologetic to Jesus's resurrection, well, we know that the tomb was empty. In order to know that the tomb was empty, you need to ensure that Jesus was probably the only person laid in it, because otherwise, it could have been mixed up." With someone else or something like this. And so there is this hint at evidence of an early apologetical motive to make the

tomb a new tomb, which means there are no other bodies in there. And then specifically, a new tomb in which no one had been laid, right? So that when they say there's an empty tomb, nobody can come along and say, "Well are you sure it wasn't somebody else, or someone stole a body, or it got lost, or something?" No, it has to be an empty tomb. And so you're right that when you ask those little questions—well, are we sure that he was taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb in the way that

it's described?—if you start to notice apologetical motivations potentially in those very stories, it starts to undermine the historicity a little bit. Like how Matthew's Gospel is the only one that mentions the guards at the tomb, right? And we're told why the guards—like we're told by Matthew essentially why he's included the story of the guards, because they are like "Jesus is gone," and the Jews pay the guards and say, "You're going to spread the rumor that the body got stolen. That's what you're going to do." And the guards are like, "Sure thing, you know, we'll do

that. We'll take that money." And this is a rumor that still persists to this day, says Matthew. And what's the best explanation for that? Is it like there were actually guards, and Matthew is the only person who happened to report them? Or has Matthew invented the guards as an apologetical tool, admitting that there is this rumor that the body was stolen, and thereby having to invent the guards at the tomb to protect against that? Maybe there were guards; we can't prove that there weren't. But when you start to see how much potential apologetical motivation is

underlying these claims in these Gospels, which, although broadly seeming to be attempts at historical biography, are also just full of what is probably best thought of as mythical storytelling, it becomes really difficult. Dale Allison talks at length about the raising of the graves in Matthew's Gospel at the time of Jesus, which is bonkers! It's absolutely bonkers! But it's really strange how it's worded as well, because it says that when Jesus dies—at that moment when he dies, there's a great earthquake, and all the graves open, and the holy ones of Jerusalem appear to people after the

resurrection. And it's a really weird, clunky wording because it says that the graves opened when Jesus died; then it says that the people appeared to many after the resurrection, as if they were just laying dead in the open tomb for three days or something. Like, it's weirdly worded, and you've got this—it’s Matthew's the only one who reports it, and you've got this undertone of Jesus being the firstborn of the dead. And it's like, okay, like, Dale Allison is pretty convinced this didn't actually happen. It's another question whether Matthew thought it happened, right? But the problem

is that if Matthew didn't—if, okay, okay, well, this is just a bit of myth that Matthew is obviously telling some kind of allegorical story—what does that mean? It means that Matthew is willing to make up stories about resurrecting people from the dead in order to serve a theological purpose. And then the floodgates are open! Especially because Matthew's Gospel is the earliest Gospel that has any post-resurrection appearance that's recorded in it. Boom! The doors are open! Yeah, well, the thing that's so fascinating to me about this is, you know, famously evangelical Christians—especially when I was coming

up in campus ministry—like we had our anti-Mormon arguments. Oh yeah, right? There was this one summer that some Mormon missionaries—like I was out of the country doing some missionary work, and Link was still in Raleigh—and there were Mormon missionaries that came to talk to him. They ended up coming back like four or five times because Link, that time especially, at the time, wasn't controversial; he wasn't confrontational. He was just like, "Yeah, you guys." So he—like, they went through the whole spiel or whatever. And then when I got back, I was like, "You let them come

like five times? You never challenged them?" And he's like, "Well, I was just kind of waiting." I ended up writing this like pamphlet. I would do this all the time; I would write like little papers or pamphlets or whatever. And there was one that was like, "This is what you need to say the next time the Mormons come to your door," right? Because you can take apart their theirology and their history really in a much—it’s so recent, right? So that was my perspective. And I find it so interesting that the average Christian apologist, the level

of scrutiny they apply to criticizing Mormonism—if they would just for a moment turn that level of scrutiny on their own story, you would be like, "Guys, come on! Do you see what you're doing?" Or like, and if you had been born in a Muslim country and you were of the Muslim faith, and you didn't believe that Jesus actually raised from the dead, what would your Muslim apologetic about the resurrection be? Like, do you really think these arguments are as strong, or is it just you need them to be true? Yeah, it’s so foundational to who

you are; you need this to be true. But the second aspect of it is it's like we're sitting here having this conversation in the context of... 2025, where we have access to all this scholarship, and all these discussions about these issues are such a recent phenomenon that, first of all, the tiny minority of people who live today who call themselves Christians care about this stuff and actually take time to think about it. Right? You believe that Jesus rose from the dead if you're a Christian, probably because your parents told you—like 90% because your parents told

you—and then you got into a movement where it's continually confirmed by people who come in and they say some smart stuff about it. This is why you can trust it. So even if it did happen, it doesn't feel like a really penetrating investigation into the historical circumstances is what's going to make it click and be like, "Oh, it did happen! I looked under the last rock of history and I found the resurrection." It doesn't seem like God intended for that to be the way. If that's right, this is clearly some sort of revelation. This is,

you know, this is like a secret—like God's secret information that you can choose to believe, and then your life is transformed. I'm okay with people who frame it in that way. I'm like, "Well, I still think that you're—I think this is a psychological phenomenon. I don't believe it; I'm a skeptic in that regard." But I just find it so interesting the way that some of these apologists go so hard on trying to prove it. It's like, "Do you really think that that's going to be the thing that changes somebody's mind?" Yeah, I mean, it's not

like it's what Jesus was doing. No, verily, I say unto you, premise one: He wasn't doing apologetics. It doesn't work like that. It's clearly not what it's all about. And apologetics can only take you so far. I mean, there is this idea online, in particular, that to be a Christian or to be religious is to essentially do natural theology, is what they call it, which is like arguing for the existence of God. The whole religion discussion has become consumed with God's existence, biblical scholarship, and we forget that it's actually an assumption—a controversial assumption—that that is

the approach to have to this conversation. For many people, natural theology is just a waste of time and an improper approach to the question of God's existence. Most people who have a religious experience will report that Thomas Aquinas, famously, didn't finish the Summa Theologica—the greatest Christian metaphysician of all time. And he doesn't finish it because he's performing Mass; he's performing the Eucharist, and he has a religious experience. His like friend or colleague or whatever is writing to him, begging him, "You have to finish this, Thomas; you've got to finish." And he says, "I can write

no more; it's all straw compared to what I've seen." And you're right about the double standard as well. I just had a Mormon on my show, Jacob Hansen, who emphasizes one of the key things: he doesn't usually speak to atheists. This is quite funny; I saw him recently, and he says he doesn't usually speak to atheists because there are so many metaphysical assumptions you have to make. If you want to talk about Mormonism, you already sound absolutely mental. If you're talking to someone who doesn't even believe in like angels and God and stuff, you're not

going to move an inch. But he's like, "I always talk to Christians because they do believe in angels and revelation and prophets and all this kind of stuff." He can kind of like hold up a mirror to these Christians because they look at him and are like, "Oh yeah, so like, you know, God spoke to some dude in upstate New York through some like golden plates that like no one's ever seen," you know? And he's like, "Yeah, well how many witnesses do you have to the resurrection that left any accounts? We've got more eyewitness testimony

to the golden plates than you've got to the resurrection." And it's this like—obviously, I can look at this and think both of them are, you know, not quite hitting the mark, right? But his big gripe is like, "I don't mind people saying that we don't have enough evidence or you're not convinced or whatever. But as a Christian, you can't switch that off when it comes to analyzing your own faith." And it does sound absurd to be like, "Oh, there was a prophet in New York. Was there?" But we've only just gotten used to the idea

that religion comes from, you know, that comes from the Middle East. The whole reason why Jesus is born of Nazareth is it's like a lowly origin. They even say in the Gospels, "Is he the guy from Nazareth? You know, what good comes from Nazareth?" We're just used to it now, but at the time that would have sounded about as crackpot as saying, "You know, this guy in upstate New York? Yeah, he's found some golden plates and they're buried under the ground." And so, I do find—like, I've talked about Mormonism a lot recently because I do

find it holds up this interesting mirror to Christian apologetics. It's like, "This is kind of how you sound, guys, a lot of the time." Yeah, I certainly agree. It is this—and to have been on that side of it and to—I mean, I— Specifically, I don't still have that document that I wrote—the guide to talking to your Mormon friends. I was going to ask, um, I mean, it might be in some, you know, box somewhere. But I can tell you that it was incredibly dismissive. And I think that I, you know, was trying to be cute

and funny at the same time. And so I'm sure I was, like, essentially saying, "Can you believe that people believe this? Like, if you only knew how crazy this set of beliefs was, you would basically deny it on the fact of how crazy it was." But it's like, it's not hey, it's not any crazier; it's just less familiar. You know, it's just less familiar than these things that we believe so wholeheartedly. Um, yeah. But at the time, you just can't see it when you're in it. You can't see it. Yeah, of course. And you said

at the time you started believing in natural selection, and your wife's in tears. Does that like put you off? Do you think, "Oh gosh, maybe I shouldn't dig any further"? Is it already an unstoppable force? Like, how does that go? 'Cause presumably she's kind of okay with the evolution thing now. So yeah, she's more than okay with it at this point. Yeah, like, how does that like begin to develop? Do you just kind of keep going and say like, "Sorry darling, but this is what I think, and there's nothing I can do about it?" Yeah,

it moved very slowly because, again, I didn't have all these YouTubers talking about this stuff. Mhm. I had to make the decision to be like, "I'm going to buy this book and take the time to read it." And I'm still, like, living my life. I'm not, I'm not like a voracious reader. I mean, I read quite a bit, but it's, you know, it's pretty slow. And Link and I are trying to build a career, and we're trying to like make ends meet. And this is the early days of YouTube, so I was a bit scared

of where this might lead. And I think I just had this idea because, again, you know, where we come from, everyone else in our families are not just Christians, but they're strong committed Christians. This is the most important thing in their life. You know, we grew up looking down on cultural Christians. We could spot them—that person just goes to church because it's the thing to do. But we go to church because this is the most important thing that we could do: having communion with other believers. And, you know, and so I think that it moved

very slowly because of that. I was getting into the historical Jesus stuff in like 2010. I like looking back at some of my journal entries, and that was when it was beginning to kind of fall apart. Like, the Jesus part was falling apart. But we moved to LA in 2011, so one of the things that happened—Link and I had a series where we were making these local commercials. Several of them had gone viral in like the late aughts, and we ended up getting a TV show on IFC. That's why we moved out here. So we

moved out here with our wives and kids all together in 2011, and I kind of thought to myself, "This is maybe an opportunity to start over a little bit." You know, we went to a church that we had some friends at that we knew from out here, and it was in Hollywood. The music was awesome, and everyone was so cool, and they wore like the cool hats. It was like hipster church, and it was so much different than what I came from. And the way they talked about these issues was just more nuanced and gray.

And I found myself thinking, "I think I could do this. I think I could do this." Because, you know, I guess ultimately if you backed this person into a corner, he'd probably believe—the pastor would probably believe all the stuff that I believe, but holding it a little bit more loosely. And maybe I can kind of have this thing like, "I love Jesus." And I remember writing in my journal, you know, when Peter talks about, you know, when Jesus is asking him if he's going to leave, and he's like, "Where else would I go?" Yeah, I

thought the same thing. I was like, "What am I, what am I going to do? Become an atheist? Become non-religious? Become a different religion?" It's just like, even if I'm not sure about this, I'm sure that Jesus is good for me. I'm sure that these ideas are good for me, and this idea of believing in resurrection and like this—I can kind of just maintain this. That's where I was when I moved out here. That lasted such a short period of time because when I would stop and I would just think about it, I would be

like, "Yeah, but it's probably not true." And I started finding people who had been through similar things I could talk to about these things. Mhm. And you start just finding there's people who have—and also I started finding people, I can't remember exactly—they weren't really talking about it on YouTube, but there were people writing about it, blogs and that kind of thing. And you just start finding, "Oh, these people don't believe this anymore, but they're still good people who want the same..." Thing out of life, 'cause we thought my wife and I thought our marriage would

end. We thought we wouldn't have anything useful to share with our children. You know when you believe this—this idea that you've got the truth and that this is the most essential truth—and it isn't just about your salvation; it's about your life. Like, your marriage is based on this commitment to Christ first. Yeah, your kids and every decision that you make about them is based on this biblical understanding and this framework. You're going to throw that out? What are you gonna do? What's going to happen to your marriage? What's going to happen to your kids? But

then you start finding all these people who don't know what they think about it anymore, and they still have solid marriages, and their kids are still good kids who are just trying the best that they can. And so I think that about one or two years into being out here, when I was kind of like, "Okay, I don't—I just don't believe this at all. I'm not going to call myself a Christian," but maybe we'll keep going to church for a while while I try to figure out what we're going to do about the kids. Yeah.

Did that have anything to do with like LA and the demons of the city, or do you think it was just like already if you'd have stayed in North Carolina, the same thing would have happened? I think that LA gave me the permission to basically be like, if I was back home, my decision to not go to church back home would have involved several discussions with family. Whereas my decision to not go to church in LA was just my decision to not go to church. Yeah, so there's no doubt. So that's what I'll give the

Christian critics is that the role that LA played was, it did give me the freedom. Sure, 'cause we're not in a culturally Christian environment out here in the same way. It's like people believe all kinds of stuff. Um, and so my decision to be like, "Okay, well, I'm just—we're just not going to be a part of this anymore," was made—it was made easier. And by that time, is your wife still in tears about it? Like, how does that progression? By that time, I think the thing with her—we were in basically exactly the same place now

in terms of like what she would—you know, she believes essentially the same thing and it took her own path to that and has her own perspective. The things that are important or interesting to me are not necessarily important issues, inversely. Strobel, isn't it? You know the case—the case against Christ, the movie? Yeah. And so she's basically in the same place, doesn't consider herself a Christian, but I think for her as a mom, who was homeschooling, you know, I think there was this, "Well, what do we do? Like, what do we do about our kids?" I

feel like I need to continue to teach some of these ideas to them, and there needs to be some kind of framework. And this is something that a lot of people who are deconstructing deal with because, you know, religion works. I definitely believe that we created it, but we created it because we needed it to some degree—for the ritual, the community, the sense of awe; these things that are essential to the human experience that I do think you can experience outside of a religious community. But for most of history, religious communities have done that best.

And when you have kids and you're raising a family and you're looking for purpose and meaning and structure, you can choose to like hodgepodge create that on your own, or you can plug into a community that has a set of shared myths. And that's a really difficult thing to navigate. But it's been a long process. But we found people who were also navigating it, found our own community. And I think that that was a big part of our sort of moving out of it. Yeah, so now what's your relationship to Christianity like? I mean, you

said you read Dale Allison's book like two years ago. That's no easy bedtime reading. You've got to still have some kind of interest in the resurrection to do that. Like, are you still reading about it? Are you still intrigued? I mean, what do you see as your relationship with Christianity now? There's a fascination with it that I just think is a natural inclination. Uh, I think that part of it—an analogy I've used before is, you know, if I had been raised in a religion that was based on the Lord of the Rings books, I think

that I would have been shaped significantly by those books, that worldview, that even if I left it, I think there is this like—it's such a part of who I am. I think going back and reading them and experiencing them would be something that was a little bit comfortable, but also helps to kind of, like, it helps me understand the way that I am. I am the way that I am; I see the world the way that I see the world because of my background. I may not completely agree with all of it anymore and disagree

with most of it, but I would be lying if it—if I didn't say it was an essential part of who I am. I'm so I think that there's always going to be this fascination with Jesus. And I almost feel this, uh, compulsion to defend the person of Jesus from the way he is used, especially in America. Yeah, yeah. In American politics especially. Yeah, yeah. Um, that's been fascinating; the rise of Christian nationalism has been a fascinating thing for me to watch. Yeah, because you know, I don't know exactly what I would have done if I

would have stayed in the faith, but I'm pretty certain that I wouldn't have gotten on the Trump train just from a Christian standpoint. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. And I think that, um, to see the way that the name of Jesus is used, and the ideas that he is being used to support, it's super fascinating. But I also find this need to be like, "Yeah, but what was he about?" Like, I don't know what the man who lived— that I do believe lived—I don't know what he actually said. I don't know, like,

what, what, like, what's the percentage of the record that we have? But whatever we have, this movement that was started, and they wrote these things, and like some of these ideas are really beautiful, you know? Like, from a moral standpoint, like the things that Jesus asked you to do: being selfless, being service-oriented, you know, caring about the poor and the needy, not just being about your own accumulation of your possessions, recognizing the emptiness in the accumulation of possessions. Like, these are beautiful ideas that I subscribe to today. So, I think that part of my interest

is this, like, I want to rescue Jesus from the hands of the people who are using him for evil. Yeah, because they're pretty out of line. I mean, Jesus says this, doesn't he? You know, there will be people who come to me saying, "Lord, Lord," and I'll say, "Depart from me; I never knew you." And there is an idea that the path is narrow. Uh, and it does just seem at times flatly contradictory, the attitude that people have. And yet, I don't know if it's like a biblical literacy thing or what, but when you see,

like, prosperity preachers, for example, flying around in private jets and things, and you think, "I just, I don't know how you can read the Gospels and not have this—yeah—just jump off the page at you." Have you seen the clip of Donald Trump asked what his favorite Bible verse is? I think this is, "I'd rather not get into this specific—it's sort of very personal." And they're like, "Really? Anything jump out?" He's like, "No, I think it's too personal." They say, "Are you more of an Old Testament guy or a New Testament guy?" And he goes, "I

would say probably equal." Equal, yeah. You. And by the way, I think by the next time he's asked, you know, what your favorite Bible verse is, he's like, "Oh, it's, you know, 2 Corinthians 1." Like, he's got the—well, this is the interesting thing about that. Uh, I—I want to give, like, first of all, there are many Christians who are just, like, buying this idea that, like, he's actually a—like, Trump's actually a Christian, right? That is happening. But I will give, there's a lot of Christians—I’ll give them credit—they don’t for a second buy that he's a

Christian. They know that he's using the Christians for his ends. But, and I know many people like this, but they believe that the things that he, you know, he's a crude tool. Yes, to basically accomplish things that are more consistent with the Christian worldview. Yes. And so it's a little more nuanced. And so I understand that that's what they think, but then I'm like, "Yeah, but okay, let's talk about the things that that platform wants to establish that are still very inconsistent with the things—the bulk of the things that Jesus talked about." Then one wonders

how much that is Christian nationalism as a whole; how much of it is really Christian, outside of just being nominally Christian in the way that Trump might be nominally Christian. I mean, the one thing that gives me pause for thought is, like, when he was nearly assassinated, he did sort of quite convincingly portray a feeling of sort of spiritual awakening after that. I mean, he put it in quite uncomfortable terms about, like, you know, well, if you look at that—if you look at how close it was. I saw the graphic of how it went just

past my head. If you look at that and you're an atheist, you know, you've got to start rethinking it. And there is this forgetting of Cory Comporator, who's the firefighter that the bullet eventually went into and killed. But I did think, if you were nearly assassinated, especially if you've already got this sort of ego mania around you—president of the United States type thing—to have your head turn at the right moment and avoid assassination, I do wonder if maybe that did make him, at the very least, like seriously consider the possibility of divine watching. But I

don't know. Even then, although I want to grant him that possible space for spiritual growth, I don't know if that develops into, like, you know, it's easier for a rich man to— for all of that kind of stuff. But, and so yeah, it's like a—it’s a crude, a crude tool. "As you put it, and if you just look at the way that I... one does wonder. I always thought of doing skits where you sort of put Jesus in the modern day and see how he would actually react—like the sort of strange juxtaposition of the Christian

attitude you're supposed to have and what Jesus was actually all about. Some of his teachings, I do think, are difficult and maybe inapplicable. I had this idea of him walking through central London or something, and somebody comes up to him and says, 'Sorry, have you got any change?' The disciples would go, 'Sorry, mate, we haven't got any change.' And he goes, 'You know, brethren, when one is in need, if you do this to the least of these, you do it to me.' So he's like, 'You know, Matthew, grab your... grab your... grab the purse and

listen to some men.' Anyway, as I was saying, then another person comes up, 'Have you got any change, mate?' And they're like, 'Oh, we just—' and he's like, 'Because one person is in need, because you've helped one, does that lessen the need to help another? No, no, Peter, grab your tunic. We're going to give it to him.' You know? And then people just keep sort of coming up. At the end, someone comes up, 'You got any change?' and Jesus is like, 'Sorry, mate, I haven't got any change.' Because I do wonder, yeah, how directly applicable

some of these teachings are to the modern world. And so it's kind of easy to say, you know, Christian nationalism isn't Christian. You know, Jesus would never abide by Trump. But it's difficult to imagine what Jesus would say about the presidency of a transcontinental republic in general. Anyway, right? So I always find it very difficult to make those kinds of claims. Well, and I think that's one of the reasons that—um, I think this is, you know, back to the idea of like why it is so fascinating—because when you really appreciate the context for what this

person was operating in... yeah, um, you know, and you think about that for every scripture, the idea that, like, 'Oh, this makes so much more sense not as some prophecy for current times, but for it was a rhetorical exercise for what they were dealing with.' And it's just, to me, it becomes the Bible actually becomes more meaningful in one sense—maybe not in like an ultimate ultimate meaning way, but in the way that we actually find and build meaning as humans based on how we interact with our circumstances and how our values interact with our circumstances.

Like, that's what these biblical writers were doing all along. And suddenly, it just, it kind of comes alive to me. Like, I always thought, I don't understand these biblical scholars who aren't Christians. Like, that it was fascinating—like you study this for a living and you don't believe it. Mhm. But now I get it. Yeah, I get it. You know, not only because it was so personal to me and foundational to who I am, but because it really is this story of the human struggle to figure out what the hell is going on. Yeah, yeah, context

is always key with any kind of art. In a way, the gospels can be considered um—like, they're not art per se, but the sort of artistic elements, the beauty, the truth, the poetry, the meaning that jumps out, a lot of that has got to do with contextualizing a piece—a piece of art. But so much of it has got to do with that. Um, that's something I clocked when I, you know, the book *Ways of Seeing* by John Berger—or is it Burger? I don't know how to pronounce it. I haven't read it, but he, um, he's

got this TV show as well that he did. And, um, one of the things he does is he shows this picture. He says, 'Just look at this picture and, you know, see what you think about it.' And then turn the page, and you turn over the page, and it's the same picture, but it's got a caption now. It says, 'This is the last painting Van Gogh made before he killed himself.' It's like, how has that changed the way that you interact with this painting? And some people want to say it kind of shouldn't—'No, the art

should stand for itself.' But it clearly does. Context plays a massive, massive part. And when you consider the first-century Jewish context in which Jesus is working, so many of his claims are transformed. And this is something Christians always want to do when it comes to things like, uh, his claims to divinity and stuff. It's like, no, you have to understand, to a Jew at the time, this would have been a really significant thing to say. You know, claiming to be the Lord of the Sabbath would have been huge. Invoking the 'I am' statement would have

been absolutely massive. But I think we do need to do that sort of writ large, and maybe some of the good stuff needs to be contextualized as well as the bad stuff, 'cause they're willing to jump on—like, if you say, 'What about what the Bible said? What about when Paul’s talking about women?' or, you know, 'slavery in the Old Testament?' It's like, oh, it's context, context, context, like that doesn’t apply today; it's like totally different. You got to understand there's the cult of Artemis, and women were getting power that they shouldn’t have, and they were..."

Bond servants, okay, but with a lot of the rest of it, it's just quite flatly like, "Yeah, the Bible gives us the guidance on how to live today. It's eternal truth." Like, "What do you mean you need to reinterpret it? What are you talking about?" And just kind of think we should look for a bit more consistency on that front maybe. Yeah. Well, I just, it's that starting point, right? You know, I think, um, you talk about the— and I know you've debated people on this—just the idea of slavery in general in the Old Testament,

right? And like, just like the conquest. And it's so easy when you're like, "Well, my starting point is that this is true," and so any answer that helps me explain this. I mean, I remember my son, the first time he ever heard about Joshua's conquest, essentially coming home from church and being very upset, like, "God got people to destroy these other communities." And, of course, I had the—I didn't have the answer that I've heard in in most recent apologetics, that it was hyperbole, which I don't know if my son would have understood that, but I

essentially was like, "This is, you know, God. Basically, God is God. God makes this decision, and he can use his people to carry it out. But also, you need to know that these people that were killed were so sinful and even the kids that were born into that, like, that the level of sinfulness was so high that it was ultimately an act of mercy." Like, there's ways that you can talk about that. I think about that now, and I'm like, "What did I tell my very impressionable son?" I basically said, "There is a time in

which genocide is justifiable." Right? That's essentially what I said. And you're saying it to your son as well. I was like, "Well, you have to understand that those little children, you know, were just sort of so, so corrupt." Oh, and by the way, remember last week when we were talking about how all human beings are sort of necessarily corrupt and we all deserve hell? It's just for God's grace that we—what's that kid going to think? Wait, so if you're sinful enough, then we should be genocided? Okay. And then next week you're telling me that we're

all born in sin? I don't know. It's quite funny, though, if you had that— I mean, the idea of like hyperbole, you know, "Oh, it's okay, son. They were just exaggerating." Well, the teachers were exaggerating. It doesn't say that in the Bible. No, no, no, it does. God was exaggerating. That's what I mean. He was—he just sort of, you know, he just realized that we'd worked that out all these years later, that he was just—he was just right. And, but then when you, like, you're, "Okay, well, what was the context? What actually was happening?" It's

like, "Okay, well, this is probably some sort of retroactive history to kind of explain how did we get here? Like, we were probably just some tribe that sort of broke off of the Canaanites or whatever, and, you know, and now we have to explain why we're not them, and like, let's create this story." And, um, but I just think that if your starting point is "this has to be true, this is God's word, and that is of utmost importance," you know, we were talking about this last night too—this, the analogy that I use of the

magic show. This is how I kind of explain my faith at this point, right? So if we're at a magic show and the magician is there doing all this amazing stuff that, to me, a non-magician is just—I'm like, "This is crazy! How does he do that?" But I've got a professional magician next to me that, after every trick, he explains what happened. He takes the magic out of it. Something about my personality loves both of those things. I love to be wowed and to believe that something is magic, and then I love to have this

guy explain why it wasn't magic. And I think that at this point in my life, the explaining why—how this actually happened, how the Bible ended up the way that it was, it was like, "Well, I believed that it was magic, and now I've got the guy sitting next to me, like a Dan McLellen, explaining why this is what it is," and I'm sort of equally into those two ideas. Mhm. But to contextualize my personal religious faith, I just can't help but hope that at least one of those tricks is magic, is real magic. And that

the tricks that this guy can't explain yet—like, why we're here at all, whatever. You know, some of these foundational things. Yeah, free will, these things can't—you know, no one's giving any great explanations for those things. And maybe they never will. And, you know, I think it was—I believe it was a member of the band AC/DC who talked about God as the blanket we throw over the mystery. I think was his line. And so I just think that there's this magic and this mystery that I sort of want to—that's my faith, that there's some magic and

mystery in the universe that I don't want to explain away, and that I'm willing to throw the blanket over that and call that God. But I understand that that's not a—there's no dogma in that, that we can organize a movement around. Yeah. We don't go to some. "House of worship," and say, "Okay, today we are going to worship the blanket over the mystery." Yeah. And so that's something I'm trying to figure out, like, what is it? And it's compatible with evolution? Even better. Yeah. And it's like, okay, is that universal unitarianism, or is there some

tradition that I can find a home in that acknowledges the mystery? And so far, yeah, I'm kind of like, I don't think so. I'm not super motivated to figure that out. But yeah, very, very LA sort of— I don't know, man. Let's not put a label on it, man. And this is a— I think it's, you know, Britt Hartley, who I’m a fan of, who wrote "Nonsense Spirituality." She's quick to point out that this is certainly a position of privilege. Right? I am a successful entertainer who lives in Los Angeles, has all my basic needs

taken care of, and I can approach these things with just a passive intellectual curiosity. I’m not fighting for my life. I'm not at risk because of the things that I believe. These statements may cause people to not like me, but I'm not, you know, I'm not being persecuted in any way. And also, I'm not living the kind of life where I need desperately to have hope that there is some sort of ultimate resurrection, that everything will be made right in the end, because my life is so bad. My life is great, you know, comparatively. Mhm.

And so I recognize that just dabbling in this, like, "What if I would go to this church, or I could go to this church, or I could join this community?" Yeah, there's an incredible privilege that comes with that. Uh, but it's my circumstance. It's like, you know, I'm doing the best I can. Yeah, given the circumstances. Yeah. Well, I appreciate it, and I appreciate you taking the time to spell out some of your beliefs. I mean, like I say, it's perhaps an uncomfortable thing—five years ago, or whenever it was that you decided you wanted to

do this—because, yeah, it's not the most user-friendly topic in the world for a lot of people. But at the same time, you want to be open with people, and it feels a bit weird to—if you're going to let people in to any degree, this is such a big, important part of your life, you kind of have to let it be known. Hopefully, in those five years, you felt like that was worth doing. Yeah, I think so. I think the real struggle at this point—I have no regrets about having told the story and being honest about

it. I think that the struggle is, you know, what good—what's the net good of me talking about these things? Yeah, right? Um, because I think that—and this is something I've been thinking about more recently—there are some people I think that I just don't want to disrupt if their faith is working for them. I'm not interested in disrupting that just because I might believe that it's not true, and that there's some sort of delusion. Um, because I think there's a certain personality that can kind of go through this process and actually come out on the other

side and still feel like they're living a really meaningful life. And for me, I don't regret the deconstruction one bit, and I don't regret being public about it one bit. But I do ask myself sometimes, and I think this is what keeps me from talking about it more—it's just, okay, well, if I'm just taking something apart, but I'm not giving any tools, like, what is my role in this? Um, and also, it's just entering into the fray, which actually is a question I had for you, right? Because [music] you are in the fray and talking

about this stuff on a regular basis, and like, 95% of the time what I do is like the silliest, most unserious content on the internet. Right? Right. And you couldn't offend somebody with it if you tried. Yeah. Um, but when I choose to—in the small minority of time that I choose to talk about this, I make enemies. People are like, "What are you doing? This is a bad example. You're bringing people away from the faith." And you know, even though I'm like, "Well, actually, I think I'm just causing people to question things that should be

questioned." It's still like, I don't like getting that kind of negative attention. Yeah, I just— I don't like, I don't want to debate. I don't want to get into it with somebody online, really, right? I'm like, I'd rather just make you laugh, be a distraction from all the stuff that's going on in the world. But you obviously step right into it. Yeah, it's my breakfast. So, like, how do you— you know, how do you approach that knowing that this is like—I know you were just talking about being at this conference where you’re basically the only

atheist. At this conference? Yeah, that’s right. It’s great fun, actually, and I've got quite a good working relationship with the people I debate with and the communities that I sort of step into as a bit of an outsider. And so it feels all right. Like, I don’t have any serious... trouble in that regard. But also, it's always been the way it's been for me. It's not like I've got this show, and I'm about to like potentially nuke it with all of this talk about like religion and stuff. Like, that's what it's been from the start.

In fact, when I sort of move in the opposite direction, like, you know, when I've spoken to you today, you've been sort of telling your story. I've been asking questions. It's been interesting. I've done the same thing with Christians, where it's been a similar vibe of like, you're just telling me your story, and I'm not going to sit there and go, "Well, I think you're wrong about this," and start debating. And people in the comments kind of get annoyed about that sometimes. Or maybe annoyed is the wrong word, but they sort of say, "Oh, you

know, I wish you would have pushed back more," and I'm like, this person's just telling me their story. You know, I'm not here to do that today. And so if anything, I kind of have the opposite problem, which is that I need to be like opinionated, fiery. If I'm on the fence too much, then people start to lose interest in what they've signed up for, which is somebody to look to for a viewpoint, for an opinion. It'd be interesting to hear what that guy's got to say. And it's all context-dependent. And honestly, I say that,

but then as I've been a bit more willing to have those exploratory conversations and non-committal discussions, the channel has grown exponentially. And so I think that is resonating with people more. But still, it means that when I do decide to come out and do the debate and remind people that actually I am still somebody who enjoys debating and defending an opinion and all of this kind of stuff, it's not like jarring for anybody, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, I get a lot of that kind of commentary, but it depends how you feel about

it, right? Because if after this conversation goes live, if somebody says that thing that he said about the empty tomb that's just like wrong, man: "Look at this verse," or "Look at this thing," you're going to look at that and you might go like, "That's kind of annoying. Oh man, like maybe I shouldn't have said that," whereas I'm going to be like, "If it's significant enough, I'll just make a video about it. I'll just respond. I'll be like, 'Okay, here's five arguments against the empty tomb,' you know? Because that's like my thing." So there's a

sense to which also, when those comments or that attitude is coming towards me, I think, "Well, if it really comes to it, I'll just respond." Whereas you're not going to want to sit there making, "Yeah, do I want to go back? Do I want to get into it back and forth?" 'Cause that's, you know, I don't speak super precisely about these things and I know a fair amount, but I'm not an expert on any of this stuff, and I'm not necessarily in the deep end. I'm usually just sort of talking to people who are in

the deep end. Sure. And so, you know, like I know I've said things today that'll be like, "Oh, I put that that way and this guy is talking about it in this way, and I kind of regret that I said that." Even though I've gotten much better about just not watching that stuff or caring too much. Just I know that's, you know, that's the business that those guys are in. Yeah. But yeah, that's interesting because you started with this in mind versus this being some, for a lot of people, for me, it was a big

like, "What? We thought you guys were Christians. We feel betrayed because we would actually let our youth group watch your videos." Yeah. Because we kind of knew that you were Christians, right? And it's like, "Well, yeah, we were. We're not anymore." So it felt like the ultimate betrayal for a lot of people. Yeah. I mean, I do sometimes get like, you know, teachers often say that they use my videos in class, for example, and a lot of school children watch. And I do then think, "You know, I really—I do need to be careful because debating

is a sport." Talked about this last night as well, and I've always been quite open about the fact that I think that debates are a bit sort of silly if you think that they're a way to get to the truth. I mean, they bring up interesting arguments and stuff, but everybody knows that they're not the most productive way to have a conversation. It's a jousting match. There's nothing wrong with that—like, it's fun. It is sport. But as I often say to people, it's like a boxing match. You will find out who's the better boxer, but

you won't find out who's the better fighter. Yeah. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to be a good boxer. You know, debating is fun. And so I'll do that. But people do watch it thinking that this is like, I don't know, that might be the only conversation they ever see on that topic, at least some of those viewers. Yeah. And it is a bit of a consideration. I remember, like, I look back at some of my older videos and a lot of them I was just—I just had no idea what I was talking about. In

particular, there's this whole video of me talking about the ontological argument for... When I was like, I don't know, 17 or something, and I watch it back today, and I'm just cringing with embarrassment. I won't take it down because I like seeing the progression part of the historical record at this point. But I remember, you know, my friends were making fun of me for it, and looking at the comments on this video, somebody says, "You know, Alex, thanks so much! I'm studying for my A-level exams at the moment, and this video has been really helpful."

I thought, this poor kid has just failed his exams because he's been watching my videos. Yeah. So there is a level of responsibility that comes along with it too. But that's why I'm also sort of trying to embody this spirit of a conversational approach. Even, like, in a debate, I'll debate people, but then we're cool afterward, you know? Yeah. We'll hang out, we'll shake hands. And I really appreciate that about your approach too because I, um, yeah, I don't think there's ever really a reason to yell about this stuff. No, you know, debates can bring

that out of you, and it's a shame when that happens. But it also—like, it's better just because it protects yourself as well. Even if you're just self-interested, like, forget the sort of, "I want to foster a positive community" and all this kind of stuff. Even if you're just fully self-interested, if you walk in with this bravado and confidence and somebody proves you wrong, it's embarrassing. You're on stage, and you're flustered, and people are clipping it up, and it's terrible. Whereas if you've gone in from the outset like, "I'm doing this debate, I'm here but I'm

here to explore this," yeah, I'm here to have a conversation. Then when somebody says, "What about this?" and you go, "Huh, good point." It's not the end of the world because your pride isn't on the line in the same way. I always thought that if I did convert to Christianity, the way that I would announce it would be I would accept a debate about Christianity, and I would let the opening speaker give their 20-minute opening statement, and then they'd call on me, and I'd stand up and I'd go, "You know what? Yeah, fair enough. Yeah,

good point. All right. Yeah, you win. Well done." And that would be how I would do it. Yeah. You, yeah, yeah. You can make a moment out of that. Many, many people are praying for that conversion. Yeah. And when I finally become a Mormon, it's going to really, yeah, rug pull, man. Really, really shake them up. Yeah. Hey, Rat, thanks so much for taking the time, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. If you enjoyed that conversation, you might like my previous episode with Rain Wilson, which you can watch by clicking the link on your screen.

For early access to videos and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack at alexoconor.com. Thanks for watching.